Category: Internet matters

Posts about the internet

Praise for Teksavvy tech support

For the last few months, my internet connection has been maddeningly unreliable. Oftentimes, it has trouble with basic tasks like loading text-based websites or accessing email. The only mechanism I have found for improving matters was to power down my DSL router, wait a few minutes, and then turn it back on. That made things better for a little while, but it soon got patchy again. TekSavvy is my internet service provider.

Non-geeks may want to skip the next section.

Technical details

A couple of weeks ago, I spoke with a TekSavvy customer support guy named Peter who helped me break down the problem. Replacing the phone cord between the modem and the wall did nothing. The problem could be the modem, the wiring in my house, or the wiring outside. To know, I would need to test the connection at the demarcation point between the Bell network (which TekSavvy leases) and my apartment’s own wiring. To isolate a modem problem, I would also need to test it with another modem.

Today, I cycled way up Bank Street to the Home Depot beyond Billings Bridge. Despite not having a driver’s license, I convinced the manager there to rent me a 50′ extension cord for 24 hours.

My one complaint about tonight is how long it took to talk to a TekSavvy tech person. I called their customer service line at about 10pm and was told someone would call be back ‘shortly.’ Forty-five minutes later, I called again and was told they had no record of me calling before. I waited some more. Then, at 12:30am, I called their customer support person and told them I had been told two and a half hours before that someone would call me shortly. At that point, the customer service person put me directly through to Todd in tech support.

He was extremely helpful. Out in the rain with my headlamp, modem, multi-tool, and extension cord, I plugged my modem directly into the demarcation point. From there, it synced properly and at the right speed. My heart sank a bit. That meant the problem was with my wiring: Bell would not fix it for free and, in the worst case, it would be necessary to rip out from the walls. I started thinking about switching to a cable modem.

Todd then explained to me that the problem could just be corrosion. The inside of the box at the demarcation point had fine black powder covering every horizontal surface. The male portion of the telephone connector inside was also brown and gunky. After scraping through the gunk on the male portion of the connector, I closed up the box and moved my modem back inside. Now, according to TekSavvy’s diagnostic, it is syncing much better.

The next step is to do a more serious reworking of that demarcation box. Ideally, I should clip the copper wires inside, strip the ends, and wrap those around the connectors. Then, I should cover them with some sort of waterproof, oxygen-excluding gunk (Vaseline?) and seal up the whole box better than it was before. That might allow decent, reliable internet access without the need to tear wires out of my walls. Another possibility for improvement is replacing the telephone jack inside.

Conclusions

All told, I am very pleased with the service from TekSavvy. After all, the wiring in the old house where I live is not their responsibility. Rather than make me pay for some Bell person to come out, test at the demarcation point, and throw up his hands saying that the problem is my wiring, they helped me isolate the problem, and then suggested practical steps for improving the situation and hopefully eventually resolving it.

I called their customer service person one more time and asked her to make a note in the tech guy’s file that he had really helped me out and I appreciated it.

One thing about all this is a bit funny. While it is easy to think of the internet as some ethereal thing that empowers human communication like nothing before it, it is also possible for a gunky little connector inside a sooty grey plastic box to interrupt it, causing months of agitation for a person like myself.

Friends of Gin & Tonic

Friends of Gin & Tonic is an amusing website that sets out to mock climate change deniers. They describe their mission as: “Self Interest and Climate Change Denial” and elaborate by explaining:

We seek to inform the public of the findings of a handful of amateurs of unrivalled capability (but almost no ‘formal’ climatological expertise) that utterly undermine the so-called ‘scientific consensus’ that the planet is warming and that people are causing it. This ‘consensus’, the biggest scientific fraud in history, has been foisted on a gullible public by a politico-scientific elite intent on a single world government with themselves, via control of the United Nations, at its head. Exercising merciless control of the scientific literature by requiring that published work be consistent with such piffle as observations, physical principles, and mathematical models, this evil clique tries to suppress the promulgation of any alternative view. Small fringe groups like our sister organization the Friends of Science are thus reduced to using right-wing blogs, opinion columns of like-minded newspapers, and guerrilla publicity stunts at international meetings to promote their message.

Mockery is certainly part of the set of things richly deserved by climate change deniers, though it is not an adequate mechanism for countering their efforts in and of itself.

They came to my attention via DeSmogBlog.

Tags versus categories for blogs

I have long felt that, while categories play a useful role in organizing information on blogs, tags are just useless noise. I am pleased to see that Matt Cutts, who blogs and works for Google, agrees.

From the words in your actual post, Google and other search engines can tell what it is about. Categories, on the other hand, provide a useful way for someone interested in a particular subject you write about to learn more about it. Someone visiting my blog might only be interested in security, or economics, or photography. Categories let them filter through to just that easily.

They are also a lot less time consuming (though less customizable) than hand-generating an index page or two.

Blackberry Curve versus Nokia E71

I have had the E71 for a while and largely found it disappointing. That said, it was my first smartphone, so I didn’t have much basis for comparison. More recently, I was issued a Blackberry Curve through work. On the basis of using both, I can say pretty clearly that the Curve is superior in most respects.

The E71 is decidedly clunky at multitasking. If you open more than one or two applications (and things like the call log and address book count), it can start grinding slowly and complaining of low memory. By contrast, the Curve seems happy to run a web browser, instant message program, and more with ease. Programs load much faster, and I have never had one crash on the Curve, while they crash often on the E71. My E71 has also been plagued by software bugs ranging from the annoying to the truly infuriating.

Voice quality is comparable between the two, and not especially good in either case. Reception is comparable in both, as are web browsing speeds.

The Curve web browser seems superior both to Nokia’s built-in browser and to the copy of Opera I installed on the E71. Neither really provides an ideal web experience, however. Both give the feeling of accessing websites through a little window in a piece of paper that you need to move around vertically and horizontally. Both also have trouble with some fairly basic web elements, such as logging into content management systems like WordPress.

I cannot comment on third party applications for the Curve, because I have not installed any. Generally, I have found those I had added to the E71 disappointing. A couple of notable exceptions are Google Maps and GMail. The built-in GTalk client on the Curve is rather good. One significant limitation of the Curve is the lack of GPS, which would actually make it much less useful as a primary phone.

Both phones have cameras that are too terrible for any serious use.

Aesthetically, the E71 wins hands down. It feels sleek and solid, whereas the Curve feels chunky and a bit soft. The E71 also looks a lot better, with nice differentiation of colour, the steel back and silver highlights. The Curve is a generic black rubber slab. The keyboard on the E71 is also distinctly better, even though it is a significantly smaller phone. The shape of the keys on the E71 make it easier to type quickly and accurately, while I find those on the Curve awkwardly sized, shaped, and spaced.

In an ideal world, I would put the guts and software from the Blackberry Curve into the body of the E71, with a keyboard and GPS transplant from the Nokia to the Blackberry offering. Given the choice between buying one or the other now, for personal use, I would probably opt for the Blackberry. It falls down on aesthetics and GPS functionality, but seems to be superior in most ways. Regarding my keyboard complaints, it also seems possible that if I had started off with the Curve, I would prefer it now.

State of the climate video

Last night, I gave a short talk outlining my current thinking on climate change.

I am interested to know which things people think I am wrong about. Also, about which things seemed to be effectively expressed, and which poorly expressed.

An improved version may be worthy of being recorded in a more aesthetically appealing manner.

Timing an Ignite presentation

I am in the process of preparing an Ignite presentation on climate change, expressing the basic point that the amount of climate change we experience will depend primarily on what proportion of the world’s fossil fuels we burn.

The Ignite format is an odd and challenging one. Each person speaks for five minutes. At the same time, each has a set of 20 slides which automatically advance every 15 seconds. These factors make it challenging to express yourself clearly and effectively.

The earliest drafts of my presentation suffered from my natural tendency towards digression. I am moving forward now more confidently, having timed myself reading four examples of text for five minutes each. Two were written by me, two were speeches written by others.

I found that I read text similar to that in my presentation at a rate just over 180 words per minute. That translates to about 45 words per slide. To compensate for any issues with shuffling notes or distractions, I will write 40 words of pre-prepared comments to accompany each slide, reducing the risk that the unusual Ignite format will leave me unable to express my point fully.

[Update: 5 May 2010] You can see my final presentation on BuryCoal.com.

Psychological dualism

There is a distinction drawn in theories about the human mind between ‘monist’ and ‘dualist’ understandings of how it works. Dualists, like Descartes, see the mind as essentially separate from the body. Monists believe that “the mind is what the brain does,” and that there is no distinction between the two.

The position of the two views in society is an odd one, as an excellent Paul Bloom lecture discusses. We can readily understand situations that presume dualism: the continued life of the soul after death, the idea that the mind of one person could be transferred into another person or animal, etc.

Hundreds of years before the birth of Christ, Homer described the fate of the companions of Odysseus who were transformed by a witch into pigs. Actually, that’s not quite right. She didn’t turn them into pigs. She did something worse. She stuck them in the bodies of pigs. They had the head and voice and bristles and body of swine but their minds remained unchanged as before, so they were penned there weeping. And we are invited to imagine the fate of again finding ourselves in the bodies of other creatures and, if you can imagine this, this is because you are imagining what you are as separate from the body that you reside in.

Clearly, we are able to imagine minds that would remain essentially unchanged, even when altered into a radically different physical form.

At the same time at dualism seems to make intuitive sense to people, all the physical evidence we have is on the side of a monist view, in which ‘mind’ arises from the physical properties of body:

Somebody who hold a–held a dualist view that said that what we do and what we decide and what we think and what we want are all have nothing to do with the physical world, would be embarrassed by the fact that the brain seems to correspond in intricate and elaborate ways to our mental life.

…

Somebody with a severe and profound loss of mental faculties–the deficit will be shown correspondingly in her brain. Studies using imaging techniques like CAT scans, PET, and fMRI, illustrate that different parts of the brain are active during different parts of mental life. For instance, the difference between seeing words, hearing words, reading words and generating words can correspond to different aspects of what part of your brain is active. To some extent, if we put you in an fMRI scanner and observed what you’re doing in real time, by looking at the activity patterns in your brain we can tell whether you are thinking about music or thinking about sex. To some extent we can tell whether you’re solving a moral dilemma versus something else. And this is no surprise if what we are is the workings of our physical brains, but it is extremely difficult to explain if one is a dualist.

The lecture includes many other examples showing why monism and the world as we observe it seem to mesh.

To me, the importance of this seems to go beyond settling scientific and/or metaphysical questions. It certainly seems plausible that beings that intuitively perceive themselves as essentially independent from physical reality will develop high-level theories about the world that take that into account, in areas as diverse as their religious, political, and moral views. By the same token, if one view really is far more defensible than the other, on the basis of observations and experiments we perform, that quite possibly has moral and political implications. It is all quite interesting, in any case, and I recommend that people consider watching the lecture series. The videos, transcripts, and slides are all available for free online.

Four days in Montreal

I will be spending the Easter long weekend visiting my brother in Montreal and playing around with a rented 10-22mm EF-S lens. As such, I am unlikely to be adding anything here before Tuesday or so. In compensation, there should be some interesting and unusual photos appearing next week.

In the mean time, perhaps readers can ponder the following question. BuryCoal.com has gotten off to a good start in terms of content, with a large number of good quality posts from several contributors. What it has largely been lacking so far is discussion and community. How can such things be effectively encouraged? Has anyone ever considered posting a comment on either a climate change entry on this site or on BuryCoal, but then decided against it? If so, why?

Sherlock Holmes and Huckleberry Finn

During the past week or so, I listened to my first two audiobooks ever. Previously, I had been quite skeptical. To me, podcasts and the like seem to require too much concentration for use when doing anything complicated, but to not really be engaging enough to hold your attention when you are doing nothing else.

Both issues have been problematic sometimes, when listening to the free copies of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that I got from the excellent iTunes U section of Apple’s music store. I sometimes had to rewind (what an anachronistic term!) and re-listen when something distracted me. Much more rarely, I found the contents insufficiently engrossing, though Ernest Hemingway is surely correct to say that the last few chapters of Huckleberry Finn are a severe disappointment.

Both books are part of the University of South Florida’s Lit2Go collection, and they are well (though I think not professionally) read. Each is read by a single person, without much attempt made at voices or radio-play style effects. I found that both books lent themselves well to this treatment, owing perhaps to their relative simplicity and the charming datedness and foreignness of the voices in them. The books can be downloaded here and here, as well as through iTunes.

I doubt that the audiobook treatment would be as well suited to something really complex and intellectual, of the sort where you frequently need to make notes or refer back and forth through the book. Nonetheless, the audiobook medium does seem like a good one for the casual enjoyment of relatively light fiction.

Conference on a world more than four degrees warmer

Given our increasingly slim chances of avoiding more than 2˚C of global warming, it makes sense to start thinking about what a world hotter than that could be like.

The University of Oxford recently hosted a conference on the subject: 4degrees International Climate Change Conference: Implications of a Global Climate Change of 4 plus Degrees for People, Ecosystems, and Earth Systems.

32 of the short lectures are available free, via iTunes.

As an aside, posts might be thin here for the next while. Work is busy, and I am concentrating efforts on BuryCoal. If you haven’t had a look at that site yet, please do. Some good discussions on the posts people have already written would be just the thing.